Friday Guest on a Monday: Emily from The Fine House

Hi there!  Emily was supposed to be my guest last Friday, but with all the blog issues, I pushed it back to Monday.  Trust me, she is worth the wait!  Emily blogs over at The Fine House and is super talented and has great style.  Here are a few images of my favorite projects over there....

Pretty awesome, huh?  Well without further ado, take it away, Emily!

Hi Primitive and Proper readers!  I'm super excited and flattered to be here today, thanks to Cassie, whose work I so admire! She's awesome, right?  

To begin, let me just start with a BIG disclaimer: I am in no way a professional designer, nor do I play one on the Internet.  There are so many ladies here in blogland with an amazing talent for creating amazing interiors.  Like, unreal talent. I am not in that league. But I do love furniture and paint.  I've taught myself to refinish furniture through trial and lots of error over the past 10 or so years and that is what I really love to do.  But that's not exactly what I'm posting about today.  Today I thought I'd write a little bit about painting rugs.

Maybe we're just crazy messy, but pretty rugs never last under our table.  I lamented the fact here.  Just, you know, 4 kids=gross mess mushed into the rug.  But I love the look of a rug under a table, plus- maybe its just us again-but I felt like we were scratching up our wood floor.  I know, chair pads.  Seriously, those never stick.  So I took the crafty blogger's best friend, the Fabulous Canvas Drop Cloth, and made a rug that was easy to sweep and easy to mop. Basically painted on my design and coated with poly.  Stick it to the floor with rug tape, and wha-lah.  Easy to walk on, easy to clean, easy on the eyes. 

Then I made this adorable flower rug for my even more adorable sister-in-law.

 In the beginning of this year, my first canvas rug gave up.  So I improved upon the design with more paint and way more poly to make it a little stronger and I think the quality is quite a bit better. 

I think it gives this area just the right amount of color.  You can read about my whole process for this rug here.

 Now enter the real challenge: I have this green shag number in my seldom used, seldom decorated Front Room.  Its in good shape, but I'm tired of the shag and over the dark color.  And I didn't want a shiny, waterproof rug there.  Although, around here anything wipe-able is usually best...  Also, it needed to be a little beefier than a drop cloth.

 I remembered I had the old stretched-out flat weave rug from, ironically enough, under the kitchen table, stashed in the basement.  It's a basic brown indoor/outdoor from Pier One via Big Lots.  I decided it would be my guinea pig.  I didn't want to spend any money on this experiment because I didn't know how it would turn out.  I used the back (pictured) because the weave was flatter than the top.

I coated it with some really old, gloopy paint I had left over that I could never use on anything else.  It sucked it up like a thirsty sailor and asked for more.  So I rolled on one more coat of $10/gallon white paint from Walmart.   With the lighter-weight canvas rugs, after the base coat I've used drapery clips to hang the drop cloth from nails pounded into studs in my basement and use our projector to trace a pattern-'cause I'm no free-hander. I planned to use the same technique to create a subtle zebra print in taupe.  But this was a huge, heavy rug to begin with and after it sucked up all that paint it was a monster.  So scratch hanging it from the studs.  So I decided to go with the crafty blogger's next best friend, Chevron.  I got out my trusty measuring stick and went to town with a pencil.  I measured the rug into thirds and then the added horizontal trace marks every 13 1/2 inches.  Then I used the measuring stick again to trace a diagonal line from each intersecting point.  Does that make sense?  The pencil marks in the picture are faint, but they're there. Go ahead click to make bigger.  Next I painted with the leftover paint from my new kitchen rug.  Didn't want to spend any $, remember?  I added some black to make it a little darker, although you can't see both rugs from the same spot anyway. 

It was a little shiny and rough, so I hand sanded it randomly.  Also, I stand by the fact

that sanding and distressing in all things hides a multitude of sins:)

And here it is!  A long way from perfect, but good enough :) I feel like it really lightens up the room. And makes me hate the ugly sofas just a little less.  As a side note I will say that this rug is a little rough, but not bad.  This area is super low traffic. I wouldn't put in our family room where we relax and spend a lot of time on the floor.  Also as a side note, remember I am no designer.  But imagine an awesome coffee table, badly needed reupholstered/slip covered sofas, lamps, sides tables, the works.  Its coming.

Thank you again so much Cassie!  Its been so fun!

Emily